


you are my sweetest downfall

by lonelyghosts



Category: Carrie - All Media Types, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bullying, Canonical Child Abuse, Crossover Pairings, F/F, High School, Internalized Victim Blaming, Kinda, Menstruation, Mild Blood, Mommy Issues, Physical Abuse, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Public Nudity, Religious Fanaticism, Sex Education, Unhappy Ending, allusions to past canonical sexual abuse for beverly, if i write a sequel to this it will absolutely have a happy ending though, jeez these sure are some tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22180222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: Beverly Marsh and Carrie White meet in a high school locker room.
Relationships: Beverly Marsh/Carrie White
Comments: 15
Kudos: 65





	you are my sweetest downfall

**Author's Note:**

> beverly and carrie is like, my FAVORITE horror movie crossover pairing. it might actually be my favorite horror movie pairing period. i LOVE them. they're the best. 
> 
> also i wrote this in... 2018? i THINK? and so it therefore kinda sucks. but im gay and i love bevcarrie so im posting it

> _What poetry has taught me is that if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to cry for it, the other trees will learn how to. In the wake of another splintering they will say, I see you. I too am growing sideways._
> 
> _\- Ashe Vernon_

* * *

Carrie White is sixteen, two months from seventeen, when she meets Beverly Marsh officially for the first time.

Beverly is seventeen and made of fire. She exudes confidence, she exudes beauty, she's in all of Carrie's AP classes and never hesitates to offer up an answer, even if it's wrong (which it rarely is.) She's the kind of girl that Carrie's mother would point out in the street and rip to pieces with her words, the kind that Carrie is supposed to stay away from. She looks at Beverly and she can practically hear her mother's words. 

Whore. Slut. 

Carrie isn't so sure about that, for her part. Boys look at Beverly, sure- and Carrie can sympathize with them to a certain extent because God, Beverly is beautiful- but Beverly doesn't look back at them. She seems like she could care less about boys- their gazes bounce straight off her and to the floor and then wither there. 

Carrie may be a little bit... enamored of Beverly. Not that she'd ever tell anyone about that. After all, who could she tell? She could tell one of the counselors at school, but she's fairly sure she'd just get laughed out or worse, looked at as if she's said something wrong. Telling her mother is a recipe for disaster. If her mother didn't kill her, Carrie's certain that she'd be hurt so badly they might have to go to the hospital. 

There’s no one else she could speak of Beverly with. Carrie doesn’t have many friends, after all.

So for the most part, Carrie hides her  dumb, strange feelings about Beverly at the back of her mind. And she likes it that way. Whenever the girls at school push her around, or when her mother locks her in the prayer closet, she brings Beverly's face to mind, running over it like a touchstone, thinking, Beverly Marsh would never treat me like this. Beverly Marsh would never let herself be treated like this. Beverly would never let someone else be treated like this if she knew. 

For the most part, that helps. When she thinks of Beverly, the ache in her knees dulls and the closet doesn't feel so lonely. The eyes of the plastic Jesus are no longer condemning her to damnation. And she can block out the words that people say about her, or to her, and things are simpler. 

At least, until the Bleeding. 

She's washing off after gym class when she sees the faintly diluted red swirling around the drain and looks down at herself to see trails of red on her thighs. She touches it and her fingers come back wet and dark red, clotted and thick. 

For a moment, the sight is so foreign she can only stare in confusion. When it registers, she cries out- almost startled at first, then louder as it sinks in. She's _dying._ She's covered in blood and she's doomed and who will take care of Mother now?

Her classmates come running at the shrieks- less out of actual concern for her well-being and more out of fearful habit. They see her standing in the shower, naked and shivering, legs stained with dark red that drips down to splash on the beige tile, shoulders trembling, eyes wide and terrified.

For a moment, she thinks they'll help her. The shock on their faces is such a sharp contrast to what they usually look like when they're staring at her, and she reaches out one trembling hand, stumbling on the slippery surface of wet tile as she takes a step forward. 

"Help," she says, still shaking. 

Their laughter hits her like a physical blow and she takes a step backward as the wind knocks out of her at the sheer sense of hurt. She should be used to this, but she's not. The girls point and giggle and shout things she doesn't understand, and Chris- of course, Chris, who loves to torment her- starts throwing little plastic sticks filled with cotton and strings at her. She bats them away at first, but the terror keeps rising in her chest and she's too panicked after the first few. They hit her softly, but the pain they bring her isn't physical.

She's screaming now. They mimic her instead of helping her, and Carrie sinks slowly to her knees on the floor of the locker room, crying out in pain, so sure that she is going to die here. Why are they doing this, she thinks plaintively, why would they do this to a dying girl? She knows they hate her. Of course they hate her. But still- she feels about to die, the pain sharp and unrelenting and aching in her abdomen. What will Mother say if she dies here, like this?

Beverly, she thinks with all her desperation, Beverly wouldn't do this to me. I wish Beverly were here- Beverly would help me, Beverly Beverly BEVERLY-

And only a moment later a locker door around the corner slams and Beverly storms round the bend with the righteous fury of a seventeen-year-old girl and shouts, "Get the FUCK away from her!"

Carrie thinks that she may faint. 

Most of the girls scurry away, intimidated- and who wouldn't be?- but Chris stays behind. Carrie's ears are ringing and she doesn't entirely catch the exchange of words, but she does hear 'don't like bullies' and 'what are you going to do about it' before Beverly punches Chris in the face so hard it'll leave a bruise. 

Her whole body goes hot and her stomach tingles at the sight of it- the way Beverly moves, the crunch of her fist against Chris’s face, the torque of her waist as Beverly puts her whole body into the punch.

Chris coughs, dripping blood from her nose. She makes some sort of noise- a garbled threat, maybe- but Beverly doesn’t dignify it with a response, and Chri scurries out just as the bell for the beginning of the last period rings.

The two of them are alone in the locker room. Just her and Beverly Marsh. 

Jesus Christ please help me now, Carrie thinks.

"Hey," Beverly says softly as she kneels down next to Carrie. "Are you okay?"

Carrie nods and determinedly does not stare at the patterns of freckles on Beverly's face. "I think so. Except my stomach hurts and I'm... I'm bleeding."

Beverly glances down, face flushing as she avoids looking at Carrie's breasts, and her eyebrows contract into an expression of faint disbelief. "Is this your first period?" she asks.

Carrie is about ninety eight percent sure she's slipped into a stupor of some kind, or maybe an alternate universe. Today has been so strange she can't think of any other explanations. First she starts bleeding from between her legs, then people throw little plastic applicators at her and tell her to “PLUG IT UP! PLUG IT UP!" Then Beverly Marsh of all people comes to her rescue, and now, instead of talking about the rapidly growing puddle of blood on the floor, they're discussing grammar. 

She realizes she's been silent too long and says weakly, "What does punctuation have to do with anything?"

Carrie didn't think that it was possible for Beverly's face to get anymore incredulous than it already is, but evidently the Lord does work in mysterious ways, because here they are, Beverly's face straight out of one of the cartoons Carrie used to read in the school library in secret, and Carrie completely and utterly dumbfounded. She wonders if this is some new kind of cruel joke.

"Are you- are you fucking- oh my god," Beverly says after staring in incredulous silence. "You- this- is this what sex education has come to in this country? You don't know what a fucking period is? Have you even taken a sex education class?"

Carrie shrinks back, ashamed of herself. "I... my mother exempted me from it because she didn't want me to get ideas. Or be in the presence of sin."

Beverly sighs and puts a hand over her face in exasperation and Carrie deflates, because of course, this is her fault. Beverly is frustrated with her, and she'll leave Carrie all alone in the girls' locker room, and Carrie is pretty sure now that she isn't dying, or at least won't die immediately, but she does feel awful and she'll have to walk to the nurse with blood all over her and everyone will laugh at her and Carrie will hide behind her hair and pray for any measure of relief- relief that will not come. All because Carrie is stupid and doesn't know anything.

She sniffles and halfway through realizes that doing so was a mistake because now Beverly think she's pathetic on top of everything else, so she tries to muffle the noise but it doesn't work because it's already out there, echoing, a reminder of her failure. And Carrie tenses up, ready for Beverly to laugh at her, to call her a pathetic piece of shit, because that's what always happens. They always laugh.

The laughter never comes.

Instead, Beverly's warm hand slips into hers, and when Carrie opens her eyes, Beverly's smiling at her in the same way that she smiles at the Polaroids in her locker- of a younger Beverly among six boys, each of them tanned and laughing, open-mouthed. It's the smile that makes Carrie envy whoever Beverly's thinking about, because that smile is bright and happy and full of sunshine. It's a smile to be treasured. Carrie would treasure it, if Beverly would let her.

(But Beverly won't). 

"I'm sorry, Carrie," says Beverly in the softest voice Carrie's ever heard. "That is your name, right? Carrie? We share AP classes."

Carrie nods. 

"I don't mean to make you feel as if this is your fault, because it isn't. It really isn't. I'm just upset because you should have known about this- but it's not your fault you don't. It's the fault of whoever didn't tell you."

Up close, Beverly is just as beautiful as she is from faraway, Carrie thinks. Maybe more so. She wants to lean in, touch Beverly's freckles, count each one. She doesn't know why she wants it, and she doesn't know why she feels so bad about it. 

"How about this. We'll get you cleaned up, and then I'll explain what's going on. Okay?" Beverly offers. Carrie finds herself more than okay with it, and nods.

Beverly grins, somewhat playfully, and Carrie's heart flutters. "Okay. I'll go get a wet cloth and a change of clothes and a tampon, and we'll get you all cleaned up and ready to go in no time."

With those words, she's off, jumping to her feet and flitting about the locker room with grace and precision, moving from locker to locker without pausing or hesitating, entirely absorbed in what she's doing. As Carrie watches, Beverly shoots her a smile.

Carrie leans backward and bangs her head against the wall. 

* * *

Carrie's pulled on her bra and her underpants, which upon further examination are also stained with that dark red but are the only pair she has, by the time that Beverly returns with the 'supplies' she mentioned earlier and dumps all of it unceremoniously on the bench before getting on her knees and brandishing a wet towel. 

"You know how to clean yourself up, right?" Beverly says, and turns to unzip her backpack. 

"Yes," Carrie says, and feels her face burn crimson in embarrassment because of course Beverly thinks that she's incompetent-

Beverly must hear the hurt and shame in her voice, because when she turns back around her face is sympathetic. "Duh, sorry, of course you can. Don't worry, I'm not making fun of you."

"Oh," says Carrie. "Oh. Okay."

She begins to scrub at the blood crusting on the skin of her legs and is gratified to see that it wipes away without resistance. She cleans herself quickly and efficiently, and by the time that Beverly has found the things she's looking for in her frankly enormous bag, Carrie's legs are just about clean. 

Beverly examines her work with a critical eye, and Carrie feels herself flush as she gently takes the offered washcloth in Carrie's outstretched hand. Before Carrie can say a word, Beverly is dabbing tenderly at the inside of Carrie's thighs, with the softest touch Carrie has ever felt. 

The hot fluttery feeling in Carrie's stomach returns with a vengeance. 

For her part, Beverly seems to have some idea of the effect she's having on Carrie, because she's also blushing by the time she's finished cleaning Carrie off. Neither of them say a word, but Carrie wishes- 

She doesn't know what she wishes for. Something unattainable.

As Carrie watches, Beverly grabs a pair of identical white underpants and holds them out to Carrie. It takes a moment for Carrie to realize that Beverly's offering them to her, and then she starts shaking her head frantically.

"I can't- I can't accept this," she protests, despite her own discomfort. Her underpants are soaked through with red and it's sticking uncomfortably to her. But her mother taught her that you don't take charity. It's rude. It's greedy. It's sinful. 

"Don't worry," Beverly replies, grinning at her as if they're sharing a secret, as if they're partners. "I don't wear them anyways, they're not my kind of underwear."

Before she can stop herself, Carrie says, "What are your kind of underwear, then?"

That. That's. Sinful. That's very sinful. And rude. And forward. And untoward. Did she mention it was sinful? Because it's sinful. In fact Carrie is fairly certain the blush of her cheeks is a symptom of the fires of hell consuming her from the inside. 

"I don't tell girls that on the first date, sweetheart," Beverly purrs, and Carrie is dead. That's. She's dead, and she's going to hell, and she's pretty sure that the exchange that just occurred between them is actually flirting. 

Beverly Marsh is flirting with her.

Beverly takes advantage of Carrie's speechlessness to shove the underpants into Carrie's hand, and sits back, hands coming to rest on her knees. There's a red bandaid on one knee. Carrie stares at it, because if she looks at the band-aid she doesn't have to look at Beverly's face. Or chest. Or anything else. Just the bandaid. And her knees, which are blush-pink compared to the rest of her legs, her long, smooth legs dusted in a smattering of freckles and a layer of soft ginger hair-

"Go on," Beverly interrupts Carrie's train of thought, and she jerks back up to Beverly's face so fast she gets whiplash. "Get changed. I promise I won't look."

Carrie nods through the rush of blood to her cheeks and the thought of _what if I wanted you to look_ and starts to strip, avoiding Beverly's gaze. If Beverly doesn't look, then she won't see the smattering of purpling marks adorning Carrie's stomach, chest, and back. Best to minimize the extent of what she knows, she thinks. Beverly's seen the welts that stain her upper thighs and the bruises that collect on her knees, but it's best she only sees those- they, at least, have some measure of plausible deniability. Carrie’s long skirts do lend her to tripping.

She pulls the underwear up- it's a bit small for her, but it fits- and sighs, relieved, at how much cleaner she feels now, before looking back up at Beverly, who's pointedly averting her eyes away. Carrie feels a rush of gratitude for this. It's a small gesture of kindness but Carrie treasures it.

"I'm done."

"Good," Beverly praises, and Carrie ignores the shiver that runs down her spine. "Now, originally I know I said I would give you a tampon, but it occurred to me that if you don't know what a period is, you probably don't know how to put a tampon in and I'm not teaching you, sorry. So we're gonna do pads instead." Beverly produced a wallet-sized pink square from her backpack and held it up at eye level. "You ever heard of a pad before?"

Carrie recognized it, kind of. She'd seen them in the ladies' room at school in the little 10¢ dispensers, but she'd never bought one- she'd never had money, anyways, even if she'd wanted to. No one had mentioned them before, not in conversation to her, but that meant little, because nobody ever talked to Carrie, not really.

Seeing her uncertainty, Beverly nodded. "That's okay, that's fine. Don't worry. Basically, you unwrap one-" she demonstrated, peeling the crinkly paper off and unfolding the cotton rectangle within, "-and you stick it in your underpants so that it sits between your thighs. You know how in underpants there's that little bit of cloth between the holes for each leg? You want to put it there. Okay? It'll absorb the blood. Obviously, it doesn't last forever, so you've got to check on it every hour or so, especially the first few days when the blood is heavy. And you should always get a fresh one before you go to bed. When it's pretty bloody, like, about to soak through, you change it out for another one. Does that make sense?"

Carrie's eyes follow Beverly's hands attentively, and when Beverly holds out a pad, Carrie takes it, examining it with interest as she fiddles with the thin edges. 

"Go change and put your clothes on," Beverly says, and points at one of the shower stall with one hand. In the other, she scoops up the pile of Carrie's clothing lying on the floor and folds them over Carrie's arm like she would a towel. "I'll put a bunch of others in your backpack. They should last you at least a couple days."

Carrie obeys, and when she returns from the shower stall in her regular clothes, itching at the back of her collar as it scratches against her neck with one hand and discreetly flapping the other behind her back, Beverly's standing with the strap of her leather messenger bag slung over her shoulder and a big, multicolored sweater pulled over her overalls. It would look tacky on anyone else, but not on Beverly. She's smiling.

In the distance, a bell rings. School's out. She missed her last period. The thought makes her stomach swoop uncomfortably at the idea that her mother will know about her skipping. She's never done it before, but she can imagine that whatever her mother thinks of it, it's not good.

"Are you ready to get going?" Beverly asks. She's almost unconsciously fiddling with the paws of her sweater. As Carrie watches, she unravels a thread at the very end of the sleeve. "Cause I plan on walking you home in case those girls start harassing you again. Plus, I owe you an explanation for... I don't know. The human body. Sex education or something. I promise it'll be a thousand times better than the one this school would have given you anyways."

Carrie smiles. Warmth spreads throughout her body, and she feels like she's under the sun again after a week of rain. "I'd like that."

* * *

She comes home with her head positively reeling with facts. Beverly is a good teacher, she's understanding and enthusiastic- if a little crude and impatient. She's affectionate, leaning her head on Carrie's shoulder or wrapping an arm around her waist, and she never makes Carrie feel bad for not knowing the answer. She's funny, too. Most of her jokes fly over Carrie's head, but she laughs anyways, because Beverly's laugh is the kind that makes laughter swell in Carrie's throat. It's infectious. 

But above all, Beverly is passionate. She's passionate about almost everything- she waves her hands in the air to punctuate her point, and goes off into rants at the slightest opportunity without signs of stopping.

It's like watching fireworks. Carrie stares in awe as Beverly talks, and her heart fills and grows so large in her chest it hurts, her smile dopey and stupid and so lovesick it's a wonder that Beverly doesn't see it and shudder in disgust. 

They arrive at the door to her house and stop. Beverly puts a hand on Carrie's shoulder, and no words pass between them, but they don't have to. Carrie feels the words that Beverly's thinking and she nods back at her. 

Beverly smiles. Her hand drops and she turns away, and Carrie watches her as she walks down the street until she's out of sight before she turns back to the door and opens it, heart still filled to bursting, words like 'consent' and 'reproduction' dancing through her brain, smile still stretched wide across her face.

She's so happy that she drops her backpack on the floor with a thud and takes the steps two at a time, when her mother appears at the top of the staircase and Carrie freezes so fast she almost trips backward and falls back down the staircase. 

"I got a telephone call from the school today," Margaret White says. Her hand rests on the banister, nails tapping as she stares down with stiff poise. Her voice is slow and deliberate, in the way that Carrie knows means trouble. It is the voice that haunts her nightmares. "Do you have any idea of what it was about?"

All the warmth rushes out of Carrie like water through a drain. She swallows through her suddenly dry throat and says, "Mamma, it was an accident. I swear I didn't mean to skip, I didn't mean to-"

"So you admit that you skipped," Mamma says, and Carrie's mouth snaps shut so fast she almost bites through her tongue. "What happened?" Her voice is cool. Carrie feels helpless again, stupid and helpless and sinful. "Where were you? Out with boys, Carrie? I wouldn't be surprised." She moves closer, so close that Carrie knows her mother can see how she's trembling. "Out selling yourself out to anyone who'd have you?"

One hand comes up to caress Carrie's cheek, and she blurts it out. 

"I started- bleeding. I started my period."

The hand on Carrie's cheek suddenly contracts and Carrie yelps despite herself as the nails dig deep into the skin of her face. She can already feel the blood welling up. 

"You what?" Her mother screeches, and Carrie's probably messed up like this a thousand times but she flinches anyways because this is different. She has never seen her mother so angry that she yells. Normally her mother is calm, cool, collected. Disapproving. This is for your own good Carrie. Makes her feel stupid and ungrateful. But she doesn't get angry. She doesn't make Carrie so afraid. 

"You filthy slut, you sinful-"

The rest of the words dissolve around Carrie like wet paintings under a sink faucet, the way it always does. In her head she hears her mother's mantra of your fault your fault. The pain is dim as it blossoms across her body again, it is something happening to another girl, and on the occasions that a particularly brutal blow smashes through the cloud she keeps her mouth shut and makes no sound.

Mamma hates it when the neighbors hear her screaming.

* * *

She wakes back up in the prayer closet a few hours later and she is bleeding fast and thin onto the floor. This time the source of it is not between her legs, but down across her face and back and chest. 

She can feel the bruise swelling across her eye and the welts from her mother's belt that are weeping across her back, bleeding from where the buckle caught in her skin and ripped open.

Her mother didn't bother trying to conceal it, this time. There's no point in bothering. Nothing will cover this up, anyways. Not even makeup. Not the bruises that decorate her limbs, not the raised red cut on her face where her mother hit her with a ringed hand and the jewel cut into her skin. 

You really messed up this time, Carrie, she thinks to herself, and tears well up not out of pain but guilt. You really messed it up. 

She gets on her knees, hissing quietly as her weight reopens the cuts and puts pressure on the bruises, and starts to pray softly, falling into the familiar void of self-blame and begging. She is so caught up in it that she does not notice the way that the crucifix splinters when she shifts her weight.

* * *

Her mother lets her out at eleven PM by all estimates. Normally her mother would have her observe future punishments, like the lectures that last hours and bring Carrie to repentant tears, and the acts of contrition that leave Carrie bone tired and about to faint. But her mother doesn't even stick around to watch Carrie pull herself up off her bloody knees, she just walks away. Unable to bear the pain of looking at her.

That hurts more than anything else.

There's no use trying to eat now, but Carrie's gone longer without food, so she waits till the door of her mother's bedroom slams shut before she walks upstairs, her feet as light as she can make them so as not to disturb her mother even further. 

In the bathroom Carrie dunks her face in the water of the sink, sees it stain with the crusted blood that's dried on her face and winces, pulling a towel to wash herself. She scrapes and scrubs until her body is clean of blood for the second time today and then looks in the mirror.

She is _covered_ in bruises. They adorn her shoulders and her chest, and if she had a full-body mirror she would guess that they would also cover her legs and her torso. Not to mention the welts on her back, which still ooze despite her best attempts to clean them. Tomorrow, in daylight, she will use the disinfectant cream to prevent infection, but until then, they're there to stay.

The ones on her shoulders and arms and legs and the rest of her body, those will be okay, Carrie figures. All of her clothing is long-sleeved and long-skirted, baggy enough that they won't hurt to wear as they brush up against her injuries. But the ones on her face...

She makes a token attempt to cover the stuff on her face up, but it's useless. She knows this from experience. There are things she could do to make it look like this never happened, she's seen girls in the locker room put creams on acne and blemishes and hide them well enough, but Mamma would beat her to death if she wore makeup. It's useless.

She'll have to go back in and face the entire school bloodied and bruised. And this is not new, necessarily, they all know that Carrie White is a bad bad daughter, but not Beverly- she's new, she doesn't know. And now she will, she'll know that the girl she extended such kindness to is not deserving of it.

Carrie cries herself to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> i might continue this if people are interested???


End file.
